This was incredible. Pegasus was an honest-to-goodness Quaker. This machine was a better man than I.
I brushed my fingers across the inscrutable buttons on the control panel. I glanced at Floyd, who was giving me a sidelong stare, as if I would be impressed by a menacing look. He’d obviously concluded I had completely lost my marbles. I smiled at him, then looked up toward the top of the cabin, where I had been addressing Pegasus before.
“Aren’t you alive?” I asked Pegasus.
“For some definition of alive, yes.”
Alive. And a Quaker. What if a tractor were to say, “I shall not plow.” Or more to the point, a gun to say, “I shall not kill.”
And the thing of it was, Pegasus was more decent than many people I knew in life. A world with Mr. Neville in it was a much grimmer place than what this almost-too-human machine made life feel like.
What did it mean for the computational rocket to be, well, a conscientious objector? Quakers refused to bear arms in the name of God. Pegasus refused to kill in name of decency.
My fantasy about paying Floyd back in kind for his violence seemed terribly petty in that moment. Surely I could be as good as mere machine. Except there was nothing ‘mere’ about Pegasus. I felt like I should have more to say to my mechanical visitor, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what.
“I suggest we postpone this discussion in favor of more immediate action,” said Pegasus. “There are three vehicles approaching the Bellamy house.”
“Oh, crap,” I said. “The Kansas City mob is here.”
At that news, Floyd looked like he was sweating a little harder, but he didn’t have anything more to say.
Chapter Thirteen
Floyd and I sat inside the orange glow of Pegasus’ cabin, each of us alone with our thoughts, strapped into our seats by the most powerful pacifist on Earth. Pegasus had said someone was coming up the road to the farm. Last time I checked, the list of people who had it in for me included Nazis, Commies, the Kansas City Mob, the United States Army, the Augusta Police and the Butler County Sheriff’s Department. Not to mention Mr. Bellamy’s gang, Doc Milliken and Lois. I was sure I’d left someone off the list, but I figured they’d let me know in due time.
My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just refused to go down to the train depot with Floyd that day.
“Do you know who it is?” I asked Pegasus.
Instead of answering, the main cathode ray tube in front of me, which had been showing a view of inside of the barn, flashed to an aerial view of the Bellamys’ house. It was as if there were a camera that looked down the rutted track to their front gate leading on out toward Haverhill Road. The entire image was in ghostly shades of green and blue. Most amazing, it was stable, as if shot from a tower, or an aircraft somehow hovering in place.
Floyd’s voice was filled with awe as he broke his self-imposed silence. “How did you do that, Vernon?”
Pegasus’ voice echoed from the cabin walls, instead of whispering behind my ear. “False-color low-light imaging from massively redundant low-bandwidth atmospherically dispersed microspore telemetry units. You may think of that as smart dust.”
“Holy cow!” Floyd yelled. “Who said that?”
Well, I’d only understood about four words of it myself, at least on the first go-round. “That was the voice of this computational rocket. Who I’ve been talking to for the past few minutes while you were whistling ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ over there. It has a personality, you know, and it’s not very happy about everything that’s been going on around here.”
“Floyd Bellamy, you may call me Pegasus.”
Floyd screwed his eyes shut. He looked as if he were either crying or praying. Either one would have been out of character for the Floyd I knew. That was before he’d come back from Europe doubled by the Nazis, before I’d seen how much he had been bent by his father.
“Oh God,” Floyd said. “This is so crazy. Please Vernon, let me out of this thing. I’ll just walk away. I’ll never say anything. Please let me out of here.” It was almost a chant, like he was praying.
To me.
“Shut up, Floyd.” Even in his panic and his fear, he hadn’t actually apologized.
Pegasus spoke in my ear again. “I regret this. I did not realize that I would disturb him so.”
“You’re pretty disturbing, my friend,” I said. “Even under the best of circumstances. For what it’s worth, I didn’t understand what you said either.”
“I did not intend to be comprehended. The truth is often better than a lie, if it can be made sufficiently obscure. Now, please watch the primary viewer.”
I looked at the screen. Three cars struggled up the muddy track toward the Bellamys’ house. I could see the man on the roof, prone with his rifle aimed to cover the approaching cars. I couldn’t see Random Garrett, but if he was still on top of the porch he wouldn’t be visible from this angle. He might even be inside, braced to fire from Floyd’s bedroom window. Mr. Neville and Mr. Bellamy were not in evidence either. I wasn’t sure who else might be in Bellamy’s old man gang, and I wasn’t about to ask Floyd about their numbers.
“Pegasus,” I said. “Can you tell how many people are around or in the house?”
The screen flickered, then showed the house as an outline, like an engineering plan. The image was glorious, load-bearing walls outlined, both chimneys, even the bricks of the foundation. There were five spots in and around the plan — on top of the house, in an upstairs room, two in the front room, and one in the root cellar. At least they’d gotten Mrs. Bellamy out of the cess pit. God bless her.
I was fascinated with the image Pegasus had given me. It was like having the eyes of God at my disposal. I sure could have used this on the B-29 line at the plant.
“How did you do that?” I asked in an awed voice.
“I scanned for calcium concentrations in the right configuration and volume for adult human skeletal structures.”
That almost made sense. Pegasus’ magic dust wasn’t just sending back television pictures that could see in the dark, it was doing some Pegasus-equivalent of chromatography. Remote control materials analysis. I almost groaned for the pity of it — such a profound technology could change the world overnight. Just sitting, distracted and in fear for my life, I could imagine a dozen beneficial and profitable applications. If this was the future, I definitely wanted to be a part of it.
“You can do that?” I asked. “From how far away?”
“From anywhere in my line of sight,” answered Pegasus. “Under the right conditions, all the way out to a range of about two hundred kilometers.”
Two hundred kilometers. That was about one hundred and twenty miles. And Pegasus could locate people hidden in cellars and behind walls. What the cops wouldn’t give for a system that just did what I was seeing.
Cops. Missing people. Something fearsome gripped my heart, a cold hand of mixed hope and dread.
“Can you find my dad?” I asked in a small voice.
“Unfortunately, I cannot sufficiently refine the scan to identify individuals.”
I missed the radio preacher voice. Talking to Pegasus had become something like reading a textbook, but that was a language I could understand, even if I didn’t normally speak that way. My college education was finally coming in useful. “Dad has a surgical steel plate in his skull. And I think he’s somewhere here in Butler County.” After a moment’s consideration, I added, “He’s probably dead, though.”
“These killers extinguished your father?”
“Yes,” I said miserably. I didn’t know which particular set of killers had done the deed. They were all starting to run together in my mind — bad guys everywhere, out to get me, out to get Pegasus. At this point, it didn’t really matter any more. They were all evil sons of bitches as far I was concerned, even the Army.